Lou Reed Metal Machine Music
Rockets spiralling out of control, into the atmosphere from fiery blue planets. All communication dead at the very last second, too late to send the message..."We have penetrated the earth's pencil-thin membrane, our hopes rest on thunderheads".
And, of course, they do.
Lou Reed must have been shooting some mighty fine heroin during the sessions for Metal Machine Music.
A collection of 4 precisely timed (16:06, if your interested) vignettes of total cacophony that have been name-checked by noise-meisters Sonic Youth as well as several who reside in various mental asylums around the world.
The Sonic Youth tag is legitimate. You can almost conjure a mental picture of Thurston Moore zoning out to the whole Metal Machine Music album, trying to find ways to turn the pure noise into catchy , post-punk indie rock.
At any rate, there's nothing truly ground-breaking on the album, "musically" that is. Iannis Xannakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen are but two postmodern composers who have created material that's every bit as jarring as MMM (moreso in some cases)...
The "huh?" thing about this album is that it was released by a man who was on the verge of becoming every bit as popular as any rock star of his day (think David Bowie or, to a lesser degree, Iggy Pop). "Commercial Suicide" indeed, and no doubt the good folks at RCA were NOT pleased.
If you forget all of that and just listen to the music, you may be surprised. Indeed, it has aged very well (as so many of Reed's compositions tend to do) and the astute listener will hear lots of things going on beneath the surface veneer of chaotic chatter. Indeed, having become very familiar with the works of Aphex Twin and Autechre, I hear this album with "new ears", ones that are much more sensitive to Reed's electronic pioneering.
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